How Like an Angel

by Margaret Millar

  Quinn was surprised by the violence of her feelings, and he guessed that she was, too. She looked anxiously around at the boats moored nearby as if to make sure nobody had over­heard her outburst. Then she turned back to Quinn with a sheepish little smile. “Frank says this always happens when I talk about my family. I start out by being very unemotional and detached, and end up in hysterics.”

  “I wish all the hysterics I had to deal with were as quiet.”

  “The fact is, the only thing I want from my family is to be let alone. When I watched you climbing up that ladder, know­ing you were going to talk about Alberta, I felt like pushing you overboard.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t,” Quinn said. “This is my only suit.”

  When he returned to the Briny Belle it was five o’clock. The Admiral was pacing up and down the bull run, wearing a new white outfit and the same old dirty expression. “Where the hell you been, you lazy bum? You’re supposed to stay on board twenty-four hours a day.”

  “I saw this fancy blonde on the breakwater. She looked like Elsie, so I thought I’d better check. It was Elsie all right--”

  “Weeping Jesus! Let’s get out of here. Call the Captain. Tell him we’re leaving immediately.”

  “—Elsie Doolittle from Spokane. Nice girl.”

  “Why, you lousy bum,” Connelly said. “You can’t help making funnies, eh? At my expense, eh? I ought to kick your teeth in.”

  “You might mess up your sailor suit.”

  “By God, if I were twenty years younger—”

  “If you were twenty years younger you’d be the same as you are now, a knuckle-headed lush who couldn’t beat a cocker spaniel at gin rummy without cheating.”

  “I didn’t cheat!” Connelly shouted. “I never cheated in my life. Apologize this instant or I’ll sue you for libel.”

  Quinn looked amused. “I caught on to you halfway through the first game. Either stop cheating or take lessons.”

  “You won. How could I have been cheating if you won?”

  “I took lessons.”

  Connelly’s mouth hung open like a hooked halibut’s. “Why, you double-crossed me. You’re nothing but a thief.”

  He began screaming for Captain McBride, the crew, the police, the harbor patrol. About a dozen people had gathered around by this time. Quinn went quietly down the gangplank, without waiting for his salary. In his pocket he had about three hundred dollars of Connelly’s money, the equivalent of four days’ pay at seventy-five a day. He felt better about it than if he’d accepted it from Connelly’s hand.

  Take a long walk on a short deck, Admiral.

  ELEVEN

  The Tecolote Prison for Women was a collection of concrete buildings built on a two-hundred-acre plateau above Deer Valley. Quinn guessed that the site had been chosen to discourage escapees, since there was no place to escape to. The countryside was more bleak than that which surrounded the Tower. There were no towns within fifty miles, and the stony soil and sparse rainfall had discouraged farmers and ranchers. The paved road that led to Tecolote stopped at the prison gates as if the engineers who built it had quit and gone home in despair.

  At the administration building Quinn told the woman in charge that he wanted to see Alberta Haywood, and presented the private detective’s license issued to him by the State of Nevada. After half an hour’s questioning he was taken across a paved courtyard and left in one of the ground-floor rooms of a three-storied concrete building. The room looked as though someone had once started to decorate it. Half the win­dows were curtained and several oil paintings hung on the walls. There were two or three upholstered chairs, but most of the seating space was provided by wooden benches similar to the benches in the community dining hall at the Tower.

  Other people were waiting: an elderly couple who stood close together beside the doorway exchanging anxious whis­pers; a young woman whose identity was hidden, or lost, under layers of make-up; a man Quinn’s age, with dull eyes and sharp clothes; three blue-uniformed women with the artificial poise and nervous group-gaiety of volunteer social workers; a man and his teen-aged son who looked as though they’d had an argument about coming, not their first, not their last; a gray-haired woman carrying a paper bag with a split in it. Through the split Quinn could see the red sheen of an apple.

  Names were called by a guard and people were led away until only Quinn and the father with the teen-aged boy were left in the room.

  The man began to talk in a low intense voice. “You’re to be more polite to your mother this time, you hear me? None of this sullen stuff. She’s your own mother.”

  “Don’t I know it? I get it rubbed in my face every day at school.”

  “None of that now. Put yourself in her shoes. She’s lonely, she looks forward to seeing you. The least you can do is smile, be pleasant, tell her she’s looking good and we miss her.”

  “I can’t. I can’t do it. None of it’s true.”

  “Shut up and listen to me. You think I’m enjoying myself? You think everybody else is having fun? You think your mother likes being locked in a cage?”

  “I don’t think anything,” the boy said listlessly. “I don’t want to think anything.”

  “Don’t make things any tougher for us than they are, Mike. There’s a limit to what I can take.”

  The guard reappeared. “You can come along now, Mr. Williams. How are you doing, Mike? Still getting those fancy grades of yours in school?”

  When the boy didn’t answer, his father said, “He’s doing great in school. Doesn’t take after me, I can tell you. His mother’s got the brains in the family. She passed them along to him. He ought to be grateful.”

  “I’m not. I don’t want any brains from her, I don’t want anything.”

  The three of them went out into the corridor.

  Quinn waited another ten or fifteen minutes. He studied the paintings on the walls, the upholstery on the chairs, and the view from the windows of a three-storied concrete structure identical to the one he was in. Quinn wondered how many of its occupants would be rehabilitated. The same people who were building spaceships to reach the moon were sending their fellow human beings to eighteenth-century penal colo­nies, and more money was spent on seven astronauts than on the quarter of a million people confined to prisons.

  A heavy-set woman in a blue serge uniform appeared at the door. “Mr. Quinn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your name isn’t on Miss Haywood’s approved visiting list.”

  “I explained that to the people in the administration build­ing.”

  “Yes. Well, it’s entirely up to Miss Haywood whether she’ll talk to you or not. Come this way, please.”

  The visiting room was buzzing with conversation and nearly every cubicle was filled. Alberta Haywood sat behind the wire screen with as much composure as if she were still at her desk in the bank. Her small hands were loosely clasped on the counter in front of her and her blue eyes had an alert, kindly expression. Quinn half expected her to say, Why, of course, we’d be delighted to open an account for you. . . .

  Instead, “My goodness, you do stare. Is this your first visit to a prison?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “The matron said your name is Quinn. Several of my old customers were named Quinn and I thought you might be one of them. I see now, of course, that you’re not. We’ve never met before, have we?”

  “No, Miss Haywood.”

  “Then why did you come here?”

  “I’m a private detective,” Quinn said.

  “Really? That must be very interesting work. I don’t re­call ever having met a private detective before. What exactly do they do?”

  “What they’re paid to do.”

  “One naturally assumes that,” she said with a hint of rebuff in her voice. “It fails to s
hed any light on why you should want to see me. My world has been rather limited these past few years.”

  “I was hired to find Patrick O’Gorman.”

  Quinn wasn’t prepared for her reaction. A look of fury crossed her face, and her mouth opened as if she was strug­gling to catch her breath. “Then find him. Don’t waste your time here, go and find him. And when you do, give him what’s coming to him. Show him no mercy.”

  “You must have known him pretty well to feel so strongly about him, Miss Haywood.”

  “I don’t feel strongly about him. I barely knew him. It’s what he did to me.”

  “And what was that?”

  “I wouldn’t be here in this place if he hadn’t disappeared like that. For a month the whole town did nothing else but talk about him, O’Gorman this, O’Gorman that, why, how, who, when, on and on and on. I would never have made that silly error in the books if my mind hadn’t been distracted by all the shenanigans over O’Gorman. It made me so nervous I couldn’t concentrate. Such incredible fussing over one ordi­nary little man, it was quite absurd. Naturally my work suf­fered. It required a great deal of concentration and careful planning.”

  “I’m sure it did,” Quinn said.

  “Some fool of a man decides to run away from home and I end up serving a prison term—I, a perfectly innocent by­stander.”

  She sounded as if she really thought she was a perfectly innocent bystander and Quinn wondered whether she had al­ways thought so or whether the years at Tecolote, the hours of boredom, of waiting, had made her slightly, perhaps more than slightly, paranoid. She was the martyr, O’Gorman the villain. The white and the black.

  She was staring at Quinn through the wire mesh, her eyes narrowed. “Give me your honest opinion, was that fair?”

  “I’m not well enough acquainted with the details to form an opinion.”

  “No further details are necessary. O’Gorman put me be­hind these bars. It may even have been deliberate on his part.”

  “That hardly seems likely, Miss Haywood. He couldn’t have anticipated the results of his disappearance on your powers of concentration. You were only slightly acquainted with him anyway, weren’t you?”

  “We nodded,” she said, as if she regretted doing even that much for the man responsible for her predicament. “If our paths should cross in the future, of course, I intend to cut him dead, shun him like a rattlesnake.”

  “I don’t think your paths will cross again, Miss Haywood.”

  “Why not? I’m not going to be stuck in this place forever.”

  “No, but O’Gorman may very well be stuck in his,” Quinn said. “The majority of people believe he was murdered.”

  “Who’d go to the trouble of murdering O’Gorman? Unless, of course, he pulled the same kind of dirty trick on somebody else as he did on me.”

  “There was no evidence of anyone bearing a grudge against him.”

  “Anyway, he wasn’t murdered. He’s not dead. He can’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  She half rose as if she were going to run away from the question. Then she realized that the matron was watching her, and sat down again. “Because then I wouldn’t have anyone to blame. Somebody’s got to be blamed. Somebody’s responsible. It must be O’Gorman. He did it to me deliberately. Perhaps he thought I acted too snobbish towards him? Or he was angry because George fired him?”

  “What happened to O’Gorman wasn’t intended to involve you at all, Miss Haywood.”

  “It did involve me.”

  “It wasn’t planned that way, I’m sure,” Quinn said.

  “They keep telling me that, too, only they don’t know everything.”

  She didn’t explain who “they” were, but Quinn assumed she was referring to the prison psychologists and perhaps George as well.

  “Your brother George comes to visit you quite frequently, Miss Haywood?”

  “Every month.” She pressed her finger tips hard against her temples as if she felt a sudden intense pain. “I wish he wouldn’t. It’s too sad. He talks of old friends, old places, that I can’t afford to think about any more or I’d lose my—I would get overly emotional. Or else he talks of the future and that’s even worse. In this place, though you realize there will be a future, you can’t feel it inside you because every day is like a year. By my estimate,” she added with a small bitter smile, “I’m now about 1,875 years old and it’s a little late to be thinking of futures. I don’t say things like this to them, naturally. They’d call it depression, melancholia, they’d have some name for it, any name but the right one: prison. Prison. It’s funny how they try to avoid that word around here and substitute ‘Correctional Institution’ or ‘Branch of the Adult Authority.’ Fancy terms that fool no one. I’m a prisoner in a prison, and listening to George prattle merrily on about a trip to Europe and a job in his office makes me sick. How can a trip to Europe seem real to someone who’s locked in a cell and hasn’t been further than the canteen for over five years? Why am I here? Why are we all here? There must be, there has to be, a better method. If society wants revenge for our crimes why don’t they flog us in front of the city hall? Why don’t they torture us and get it over with? Why do they leave us here to pass endless unproductive hours when we might be doing something useful? We’re like vegetables, only vege­tables grow and get eaten and we don’t even have that much satisfaction. We’re not wanted even for dog food.” She held out her hands. “Put me in a meat grinder, chop me up, let me feed some hungry dog, some starved cat!”

  Her voice had risen, and people in the adjoining cubicles were standing and peering over the partitions at her.

  “Let me be useful! Grind me up! Listen to me, all of you!

  Don’t you want to be ground up to feed the starving animals?”

  The matron hurried over, her keys jangling against her blue serge thighs. “Is anything the matter, Miss Haywood?”

  “Prison. I’m in prison and the animals are starving.”

  “Hush, now. They’re not starving.”

  “You don’t care about them!”

  “I care more about you,” the matron said pleasantly. “Come along, I’ll take you back to your room.”

  “Cell. I am a prisoner in a prison and I live in a cell, not a room.”

  “Whatever it is, you’re going back to it and I don’t want any fussing and carrying-on. Now be a good girl, eh?”

  “I am not a good girl,” Miss Haywood said distinctly. “I am a bad woman who lives in a cell in a prison.”

  “Good grief.”

  “And watch your language.”

  The matron put a firm hand on Alberta Haywood’s elbow and guided her out. The conversations in the room began again but the voiccs were quieter, more guarded, and when Quinn got up to leave, the eyes that followed him seemed full of accusations: You didn’t answer her question, mister. Why are we all here?

  Quinn returned to the administration building, and after another series of delays was given permission to see the psy­chiatric social worker who counseled the inmates due for parole hearings.

  Mrs. Browning was young, earnest, baffled. “This is a period of great strain for all of them, naturally. Still, the report of Miss Haywood’s crack-up surprises me. I suppose it shouldn’t. I’ve had very little actual contact with her.” She adjusted her spectacles as if she hoped to bring Miss Haywood into clearer focus. “In an institution like this, where the psychology de­partment is understaffed, it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, and heaven knows we have enough squeaky wheels without bothering about the quiet ones like Miss Haywood.”

  “She’s never caused any trouble?”

  “Oh no. She does her work well—in the prison library—and she teaches a couple of courses in bookkeeping.” To Quinn it was a nice piece of irony, but Mrs. Browning seemed unaw
are of it as she continued, “She has a natural talent for figures.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “I’ve frequently noticed that among women there is a cor­relation between mathematical ability and a lack of warmth and emotion. Miss Haywood is respected by the other inmates but she’s not well liked and she has no special friends or con­fidantes. This must have been true of her before she was sent here because only one person comes to visit her, a brother, and his visits are anything but satisfactory.”

  “In what sense?”

  “Oh, she seems to look forward to them, yet she’s upset for a long time afterwards. And by upset I don’t mean the way she acted today. Miss Haywood withdraws, becomes com­pletely silent. It’s as if she has so very much to say, to get off her chest, that she can’t allow herself to begin.”

  “She began today.”

  “Yes, perhaps it’s a breakthrough.” But Mrs. Browning’s eyes were strained as if the silver lining they saw was very faint and far away. “There’s another odd thing about Miss Haywood, at least it’s odd to me when I consider her cir­cumstances: she’s nearly forty, she has a prison record, she’s without a husband and family to return to, she can hardly get another job in the only field she’s trained in; in other words, her future appears pretty black, and she herself claims she’s only waiting to die. Yet she takes extraordinarily good care of herself. She diets, and to diet in a place like this which has to serve a lot of cheap starchy food requires a great deal of will power. She exercises in her cell, half an hour in the morning, half an hour at night, and the eighteen dollars she’s permitted to spend in the canteen every month—supplied by her brother—goes for vitamin pills instead of cigarettes and chewing gum. I can only presume that if she’s waiting to die she’s determined to die healthy. . . .”

  TWELVE

  Quinn spent the night in San Felice, and by noon the follow­ing day he was back in Chicote. The weather had not im­proved during the week and neither had Chicote. It lay parched and prosperous under the relentless sun, a city of oil that needed water.